


How to Sell a Globe

by patrokla



Category: Documentary Now! (TV 2015)
Genre: M/M, Period-Typical Sexism, Repression, Unrequited Love, being a globesman is about 1) being gay 2) trying to sell globes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-21
Updated: 2019-12-21
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:33:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21884554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/patrokla/pseuds/patrokla
Summary: “We’re gonna do great things,” Tommy had told him, squeezing his arm tight around Pete. “We’re gonna be the greatest globesmen the circuit’s ever seen.”
Relationships: Tom O'Halloran/Pete Reynolds
Comments: 10
Kudos: 19





	How to Sell a Globe

**Author's Note:**

> Another finals week procrastination fic. I watched "Globesman" and then I had a lot of feelings and here we are.
> 
> Warnings for canon-typical sexism.
> 
> The song Tommy references is "Back in My Arms Again" by the Supremes.

Pete flies economy class from Tallahassee to Cincinnati on a Tuesday morning. Tommy is seated two rows behind him; Pete can just catch the side of his face when he looks, casually, down the aisle. It’s a long flight. He looks a reasonable number of times. 

— 

It’s always two singles per room, two rooms, at the motels. He and Mike usually room together these days. It used to be him and Tommy, but that was before. Mike isn’t married, so he doesn’t mind Pete using the phone to call Judy and the kids every night. Still, Pete figures if it were him, he wouldn’t want to listen to Mike natter to his wife for an hour every night, so he keeps his calls to a few times a week. 

“Dorothy’s birthday is next Friday,” Judy tells him Tuesday evening, sounding a little tired.

“Oh,” he says, “I mean, I know. Is she going to have a party?”

“She said she doesn’t want one,” Judy says. “Said she just wants, and I quote, ‘Daddy to come home.’”

“Oh,” he says again. “Honey, I just - the company’s pushing us real hard right now, and I don’t think I’ll be able to find the time.”

“Pete,” Judy sighs, but she doesn’t push it. 

“I’ll wire some money,” Pete promises. “Get her something nice and tell her I sent it?”

“Alright,” Judy says, “alright.”

They talk for a few minutes after that. He tells her about a magazine he’d read on the plane, she tells him about how everyone liked her casserole at church last Sunday except Betty Gifford, and wasn’t that just like Betty? 

“Just like her,” Pete says, and he’s searching for something else to mention, to ask about, when a shrill yell echoes across the phone line.

“Oh, that’ll be Jack,” Judy says. “He’s been waking up at eight pm like clock work for the last few months. My mother says it’s normal, but getting him down again is…”

“I’ll let you get to it,” Pete says.

“Alright,” Judy says distractedly, “have a good night.”

“You too,” he says, and then she’s gone. 

He lights a cigarette and lays back on the bed, blowing smoke up to the ceiling. Next door, he can hear Mike and Bob and Tommy talking. Glasses clink. 

He thinks about going over, enjoying one of the rare nights Tommy’s mood stays light, but he doesn’t. He falls asleep in his socks and trousers on top of the coverlet, listening to muffled laughter through the wall. 

—

He and Judy met in a community college literature course in 1963. He’d been entertaining thoughts of being a writer, moving to New York, or maybe San Francisco. She’d wanted to get away from a house full of younger siblings, and they both liked Gary Snyder. It’d gone very simply from there: dating, then a short engagement, and then marriage. And then, a year later, Dorothy - he’d rushed home from Albuquerque for her birth. 

He’d dropped out of his courses and joined Amalgamated Globes a few months after the wedding, and he’d been on the road most of the time since then. He got two weeks off after Christmas, and three weeks in June, and it was hard, of course, being away so much, but it was a decent living. Judy was taking care of the children in a house they owned, and he’d used his bonus last Christmas to buy her a new washing machine. They’re getting along perfectly alright. 

—

Wednesday morning, he makes a sale to an elderly gentleman who’s persuaded into buying a globe after Pete lets him spend forty-five minutes pointing out every country he’d served in, back during the war. 

He meets up with the guys for lunch at a diner by the motel. He gets an omelet with cheese and mushrooms; Tommy orders toast and tells the waitress to put it on Pete’s check. He’s sullen all through lunch, and when Pete invites him along to his next address, he just shakes his head and stays outside the diner, smoking. Pete watches him in the rearview, and worries.

—

“How’s the missus?” Mike asks, Wednesday night. 

“Oh, she’s alright,” Pete says. He adds, after a moment, “Dorothy, my eldest, she’s turning five next Friday.”

“Five,” Mike exclaims, “we should celebrate.”

They’ve already got the scotch out, and Pete’s glass is half-full, but he lets Mike top it up anyway.

“You going back for it?”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” Pete says, taking a sip. “It’d mess up our whole route, you know. And flights to Pasadena aren’t cheap this time of year.”

“If you say so,” Mike says. “I hear those years go by fast, though.”

“I know that, Mike,” Pete says, and he takes another, bigger sip. “I’m just trying to provide for my family.”

Mike shrugs, and raises a hand in surrender. “I’m just saying, she’ll only be five once.”

“I know,” Pete says again. “Let’s talk about something else.”

Mike applies himself to the scotch, and they stay quiet for the rest of the night.

—

Pete takes Tommy along with him on Thursday morning. 

“I was thinkin’,” he says, glancing over at Tommy from the driver’s seat, “remember that old pitch we used to do. Kinda a ‘good cop, bad cop’ routine?”

“Yeah, I guess,” Tommy says. He’s been sullen since Wednesday, and hasn’t sold anything all week, according to Bob. Pete’s determined to turn that around today.

“Well, let’s try that,” he says. “You be the good cop, talk up the globe.”

“I know what ‘good cop, bad cop’ means,” Tommy snaps. “Worry about your own part. You were never any good at bad cop.”

“I was alright,” Pete says.

—

“I ain’t never seen much use in a globe,” Pete says to Martha, the housewife who’d answered the door. “Awful lot of money for something I got memorized.”

“You got the whole world memorized?” Martha’s son, Gordy or Jordy or something like that, looks skeptical. 

“Course I do,” Pete says, crossing his arms. “Only a real dummy wouldn’t.”

Tommy snorts at that, and mouths _cool it_ at Pete while Martha looks at the globe. 

“Not all of us can be like Albert Einstein over there,” Tommy tells Martha. “A good globe is like a good dictionary - if you have one on hand, you can rest easy knowing you’ll always be able to answer any globe-related questions.”

“I haven’t had too many of those in my life,” Martha says, and Pete can see where Gordy-Jordy gets the skepticality from. 

“So you don’t think about the world much, huh,” he says, and she flushes.

“No, I do,” she insists. 

“Of course you do,” Tommy soothes. “And next time you do, you’ll have the globe on hand to make sure all your facts and figures are up to date.”

“I’ve got an atlas,” she says, and Pete can see it - the waver, the weak spot. Tommy’s got a chance, if he works right.

“Atlases,” Tommy says dismissively, and maybe a little viciously. “Those things, you gotta lug ‘em around. You can’t keep an atlas as a centerpiece, can you? But a beautiful globe like this?”

He’s almost got her, Pete can feel it, and then -

“Go great in a house with a beautiful thing like you,” Tommy says, and he hits it a little too hard, leans in a little too close. Martha makes a face and moves away from him.

“I’ve got an atlas,” she repeats, stronger this time.

Gordy-Jordy crosses his arms and glares at Pete.

“She’s got an atlas!” he echoes, and Pete suppresses a wince. Lost ‘em.

—

Pete met Tommy at an Amalgamated Globes sales conference in Lexington, early spring of 1965. He’d noticed him straight away, all the way across the conference room, because Tommy had been wearing a Fedora, bright white with a black ribbon, and it’d reminded Pete of a movie he’d seen about Al Capone when he was younger. He’d seen it two or three times with his younger brother, and he’d liked the swagger that Capone had. The way he was absolutely in charge of his world, for a minute. Pete had had a dream once where he worked for Capone, and Capone had liked the look of him, and one evening he’d called Pete in and given him a look and a raised eyebrow and Pete had known exactly what that look meant, and so he’d -

And so he hadn’t gone to see the movie again, but he’d seen Tommy at the conference room and found out he did the national circuit, the one that paid best because you were always moving. And Pete had been doing well on the regional circuit, up and down California and sometimes inland, but, as he’d explained to Judy, he could always do better. He’d talked his way onto the national circuit by the end of the night, and he hadn’t looked back.

He and Tommy had gotten on well, too. Tommy was on a hot streak all through ’65 and ’66, and Pete had still been learning, been picking up the tools of the trade. And Tommy had been happy to teach him, and generous, too. There’d been one night where Tommy had sold five - five! - globes to the principal of an elementary school, and he’d taken Pete out to dinner afterwards. Not the cheap diners they went to now, but a real fancy place. They’d had steak and a slice of cheesecake each, and a glass of wine, and then a whiskey. 

Then they’d gone back to their motel room, and had a few more whiskeys. Tommy had been wearing the hat. Pete remembers that through the drunken tattered haze of that night, that Tommy had been wearing the Fedora, and Pete had gotten a little mixed up. Maybe he’d always been a little mixed up, but he kept it to himself, and the one time, the one time he’d been stupid enough to let it out, it’d been with Tommy.

Tommy had been awfully decent about it, all things considered. He’d pushed Pete away after a minute, or maybe Pete had pulled away, and he’d moved his hand from Pete’s thigh and said, “Pete, I - I think we better get to sleep.”

He hadn’t looked at Pete as he said it, hadn’t looked at Pete the whole next day either, and Pete had been - well, he’d just been glad that Tommy didn’t tell anyone else about it. That’d been a kind thing, a real kind thing for him to do. 

Two months later, Bob and Mike had joined them on the national circuit, and when Tommy suggested they start switching up roommates so they could swap sales tips more effectively, Pete had smiled and gone along with it. What else was he going to do?

—

Tommy slams the passenger door and knocks his hat off, running his hands through his hair. Graying strands stick out between his fingers, and Pete watches as his knuckles whiten and he pulls at his scalp.

“Tommy,” he says quietly, but Tommy doesn’t look at him.

“What the hell was that?”

“Sometimes a sale goes wrong -“ Pete starts, and Tommy shakes his head, hair twisting in his fingers.

“No,” he says, finally letting go and looking up at Pete. _Glaring_. “What the fuck were you doing in there? Bad cop? Was that what that was?”

“It was -“ me trying to give you a chance to not screw up, Pete thinks, uncharitably, but he doesn’t say that. “I guess I came on a little strong.”

“You guess,” Tommy sneers. “Yeah, maybe. Rule number one of selling a globe is to not call a client a dummy. Jeezus.”

Pete bites down on all the things he could say, and starts the car. They drive in silence for a few minutes, Pete smoking a cigarette as he goes slowly down the winding streets of the suburb, until Tommy breaks the quiet with a sigh.

“That was uncalled for,” he says. “We all mess up sometimes, Pete. It’s alright.”

He turns the radio on, fiddling the dial until he stops, suddenly, on a song Pete half-recognizes.

“Remember that conference we met at? We shared a cab back to the hotel and this was playing,” Tommy says, smiling a little. 

There’s a woman singing, “Lost him once through friends’ advice, but it’s not gonna happen twice,” and Pete does remember, suddenly. They’d shared a cab with some other globesman, a guy named Jerry who worked the Texas circuit, and Pete, as the new guy, had had to sit in the middle, pressed against Tommy. 

They’d all been a little drunk and raucous, and the cabdriver had turned up the radio to drown them out, Pete suspected, and the Supremes had been playing. Pete had been pressed up against Tommy’s side, and Tommy had slung a companionable arm around his shoulders as Jerry tried to make drunken conversation with the cabdriver. 

“This time I’ll live my life at ease, being happy lovin’ whom I please,” the Supremes had sung as Pete grinned down at Tommy.

“We’re gonna do great things,” Tommy had told him, squeezing his arm tight around Pete. “I got a good feelin’ about you, Pete. We’re gonna be the greatest globesmen the circuit’s ever seen.”

“I remember that,” Pete says, looking straight at the road. “That was a good night.”

“Yeah,” Tommy says quietly. “That was a good night.”

“I made twenty-seven thousand that year,” he says a few minutes later. “Can you believe that? Twenty-seven thousand.”

“You’ll get there again,” Pete says reassuringly, and Tommy sighs.

“Yeah, maybe. You ever think about just driving off, sometimes? Never going back to the motels or those damn conferences? Just driving out of the city and the past that, out of the state, until you hit an ocean?”

Pete’s hands tighten on the steering wheel, and he can’t answer, for a moment. Has to tamp down every stupid thing he wants to say.

“No,” he says finally. “Tommy, we’re globesmen. We can’t just - I have a family. You have a wife.”

“Not for long,” Tommy mutters. “I don’t know what you see in this life, Pete, I really don’t.”

Pete glances over at him, then back at the road. Puts the turn signal on and turns left, towards the next address.

“I get to see the whole world, Tommy,” he says, and that tears a disbelieving laugh out of Tommy. 

“A whole world of motel rooms,” he says, shaking his head, but he’s smiling a little as they pull up to 227 Herring Street. 

“Good cop, bad cop?” Pete suggests, as Tommy grabs the globe they hadn’t been able to sell to Martha.

“Absolutely not,” Tommy says. “Just - just follow my lead, alright? I’m gonna try that move I pulled in Florida. I’m thinking about calling it the tough guy routine.”

Pete doesn’t have seventy bucks in his wallet this time, but - but maybe Tommy will be able to sell it on his own. Or maybe the guy inside will take a check.

“Sounds good, Tommy,” he says.

Tommy straightens his coat before he rings the bell, pulling it square over his shoulders. He doesn’t wear the Fedora these days, but for a second Pete sees it in him again - the potential to rule the room. Maybe even the world. 

“Here we go,” Tommy says, looking over at Pete and giving him a reassuring nod. 

“Let’s sell a globe.”


End file.
